Good luck avoiding roads and footpaths. And don't you dare ever turn up to a hospital without insurance, or call the police or fire department. After all, those aren't things government should be doing, should it?

This is true. But you're going to get about a dozen replies from MS-bashers who are going to argue that, in this one particular case, patent-trolling is okay (because it hurts MS). These same guys will then promptly scream bloody murder if the same company sues Apple or an OSS developer for patent infringement.

Casinos are a way to tax the poor without feeling all that bad about it as nobody forced them to p[l]ay and they 'probably' were tourists anyway. The government, citing all the social harm done by gambling claims the right to extract a percentage of the profits. Higher payouts would just make it less obvious to the players that the odds were stacked against them, and maybe even increase gambling and the casinos profit, which necessarily means increase the total amount lost by players. Casinos have to build big shiny crap to keep the morons coming so they need a substantial profit margin to make the investment attractive. The big shiny crap attracts tourists and tourist industry that in turn keeps the locals employed as dishwashers, waiters, and such, ensuring a sufficiently large patronage of serf votes to keep the whole thing politically popular.

Wrong! Your conclusion is totally flawed. The corporations would exist whether or not government existed. In fact, they would be even more powerful. All they have to do is consolidate, merge and buy themselves into a monopoly position. Apparently you seem to be completely ignorant about the fact that monopolies are in fact quite common and do happen with regularity. Even without a monopoly, corporations can still abuse consumers as with this net censorship. Without government there would be very little to stop censorship by ISPs, the FCC would not even be trying to accomplish this under the Obama Administration. A corporation, with its control and ownership of assetts and its private police forces is all it needs to take away all of your rights. In fact, it would be able to do that with even more speed without government there to stop it. Get off this anti-government garbage. The fact is, we need a government to protect our rights since it has the power and capability to do so, to regulate these corporations. if we want freedom, instead of no government, we need a government that is on our side and works for us. The way to accomplish that is to get the corporate money out of elections and the lobbyists out of washington. it is us the politicians should answer to and accountable to, not the corporations. The corporations would just LOVE for you to destroy your government, then there would be nothing left of any real significance to stop them from implementing their totalitarian regime, except perhaps a violent revolution to try to overthrow them. Corporations fund the Republicans particularly because they will allow them to expand their power by dismantling governmental oversite. Then corporations use their vast funds they acquired due to their abusive practices to fund the republicans, its a vicious cycle. Democratic government is the civilised way to make sure that the corporations are forced to respect us and that they are required to obey laws, that there will be no censorship and that they will not treat us like rubbish.